dunklezhan
04-24-2010, 04:50 AM
I've moaned whenever the opportunity arises about this, but I don't think I've ever formally made the suggestion:
The problem this suggestion would address is this:
Those with systems that for one reason or another can't run at the high resolutions have real problems with visible screen real estate in this game. This game needs you to have quick access to many hotbars. Some people manage with Ctrl-scrolling through just one but these are a minority. Unless you have a large monitor and a gfx card capable of high resolutions (by which I mean anything over 1024x768 really which is all some older TFT's can manage), you can end up with only enough room to see your character and very little else, very easily.
I myself ended up actually buying a larger monitor just to make DDO playable. Yes, I was that impressed with the game that this rather jarring 'feature' didn't make me just quit in frustration (it was close - I had to really think about it), and had enough disposable income at the time that I upgraded my monitor just to be able to have a shot at effective play. I'm really glad I did because that was only at L4. By L10ish where most of my characters are now, I'm finding the need for 10+ hotbars on the screen at once on most characters, with clickies, pots, weapon sets, spells, combat abilities, active feats and enhancements, etc.
So that's the problem. I've suggested full UI scaling in the past, but maybe that's too difficult, I don't know.
My suggestion then is a little simpler than that:
All UI objects should be independently resizeable, (like the chat windows and large map view are). This would include the quest objectives window (though the ability to make this transparent helps anyway), all hotbars, focus orb, character HP/mana/ki bar, quick button bar (for inventory, store, quest log etc), and so on. If you resize the main hotbar (i.e. the one with the up/down selector arrows) all other hotbars should be tied to that, and resize with it.
The second problem relates to retaining UI settings. Unless one logs out and quits the game, any changes to the layout (position of bars, resize of chat window etc) reset themselves if you, say, alt/tab out of the game (e.g. to go look at my character planner before I spend APs or level up). I've also found this happens if I merely log back to the character selection screen and then log back in. There needs to be a way to save the current UI layout under gameplay options.
The reason I've made the two suggestions together is because if you could do UI component resizing at will, the problem of it resetting itself would be that much more obvious. The UI 'save' feature needs to be in place before the resizing feature. If the resizing feature never gets added to the dev to do list, then the save feature would be useful anyway, and probably the easier of the two developments.
The problem this suggestion would address is this:
Those with systems that for one reason or another can't run at the high resolutions have real problems with visible screen real estate in this game. This game needs you to have quick access to many hotbars. Some people manage with Ctrl-scrolling through just one but these are a minority. Unless you have a large monitor and a gfx card capable of high resolutions (by which I mean anything over 1024x768 really which is all some older TFT's can manage), you can end up with only enough room to see your character and very little else, very easily.
I myself ended up actually buying a larger monitor just to make DDO playable. Yes, I was that impressed with the game that this rather jarring 'feature' didn't make me just quit in frustration (it was close - I had to really think about it), and had enough disposable income at the time that I upgraded my monitor just to be able to have a shot at effective play. I'm really glad I did because that was only at L4. By L10ish where most of my characters are now, I'm finding the need for 10+ hotbars on the screen at once on most characters, with clickies, pots, weapon sets, spells, combat abilities, active feats and enhancements, etc.
So that's the problem. I've suggested full UI scaling in the past, but maybe that's too difficult, I don't know.
My suggestion then is a little simpler than that:
All UI objects should be independently resizeable, (like the chat windows and large map view are). This would include the quest objectives window (though the ability to make this transparent helps anyway), all hotbars, focus orb, character HP/mana/ki bar, quick button bar (for inventory, store, quest log etc), and so on. If you resize the main hotbar (i.e. the one with the up/down selector arrows) all other hotbars should be tied to that, and resize with it.
The second problem relates to retaining UI settings. Unless one logs out and quits the game, any changes to the layout (position of bars, resize of chat window etc) reset themselves if you, say, alt/tab out of the game (e.g. to go look at my character planner before I spend APs or level up). I've also found this happens if I merely log back to the character selection screen and then log back in. There needs to be a way to save the current UI layout under gameplay options.
The reason I've made the two suggestions together is because if you could do UI component resizing at will, the problem of it resetting itself would be that much more obvious. The UI 'save' feature needs to be in place before the resizing feature. If the resizing feature never gets added to the dev to do list, then the save feature would be useful anyway, and probably the easier of the two developments.